Rabbi Posnanski: ‘US is our Palestine’

In l84l, at the dedication ceremony of Temple Beth Elohim in Charleston, South Carolina, Rabbi Gustav Posnanski declared: “This country is our Palestine, this city our Jerusalem, this house of God our Temple (Temple of Mount)”.

Since the European established a colony on North America in 1607 CE, Jewish elites along with their Christian counterpart, had played a major role in politics, trade, slavery and prostitution. Professor Howard Morely Sachar in his book ‘History of the Jews in America’ has confirmed that United States was most probably the first Jewish state in Americana. He has claimed that “no law was ever enacted specifically against Jews” – a golden rule which exists even today.

Jewish academic, Dr. Norman Finkelstein in his controversial book, ‘The Holocaust Industry’ has claimed that Israel was not a serious topic among the American Jews until 1967 war. Since then, the Zionist Jewish organizations have turned the Jews from being an American religious group like Catholics, Protestants, Muslims, Hindus and others – into a ‘nation within a nation’. Now, many American Jews carry US-Israel dual citizenship – and worse, most of their leaders openly lobby for the Zionist entity.

As ideas of Jewish nationalism began to emerge in Europe, the leader of American Reform Judaism, Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, speaking of Theodor Herzl and the nascent movement, declared: “We denounce the whole question of a Jewish state as foreign to the spirit of the modern Jew in this land, who looks upon America as his Palestine, and whose interests are centered here.”

The Chairman of the Jewish Agency, Berl Locker, made in 1950 this formal statement before the Action Committee of the World Zionist Organization: “Israel’s flag is our flag and it is often necessary to suffer for a flag. We must see to it that the Zionist flag which has begun to fly above the State of Israel is hoisted aloft over the entire Jewish people until we achieve the completion of the ingathering of the exiles.”

In 1998, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called upon American Jews to make a “mass aliyah” to Israel. In 2000, Israeli President Moshe Katsev called upon Jews around the world to make aliyah and argued against “legitimizing” Jewish life in other countries.

When Israel was first established, many prominent American Jews were concerned about Zionist leaders’ contempt for Jewish life outside of Israel and their desire for a massive emigration of all Jews to the new state. In particular, they did not want Israel to interfere in the internal affairs of the American Jewish community.

In recent years, a mass emigration effort organized and partly financed by Nefesh B’Nefesh, has sought to boost North American emigration to Israel, providing grants of up to $25,000 for each new immigrant. This program, said Prime Minister Netanyahu, will “bring home to Zion our Jewish brethren from the diaspora.”

From Israeli flags in synagogues to “Birthright Israel” trips sending young people on free visits to Israel to a host of Jewish organizations focusing on influencing U.S. Middle East policy – including current efforts to secure the release of Jonathan Pollard, the Naval intelligence officer convicted of spying for Israel – the center of attention within the organized American Jewish community has not been the traditional Jewish religious commitment to God but something far different.

Tikkun editor Michael Lerner asserts that, “We did not survive gas chambers and crematoria so that we could become the oppressors of Gaza.”

“Zionist philosophy never factored in a free and open society with religious freedom for all of its citizens. Millions of American Jews — for many generations – have embraced that free society. A narrow, exclusivist, theocratic state holds little appeal for them,” concludes Allan Brownfeld.